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A Comment about Depression and Doctors

If we consider illnesses to span the range from being causes to being symptoms, depression is squarely in the latter category. But it is treated as if it’s a cause, because it relieves the “it’s your fault” burden off of people, and because there is a social taboo on being different. If we assume that half the time the cause of the depression (the mere symptom) is in the environment, we have to start accusing people other than the patient, up to and including society itself.

But even if the cause does reside in the individual, in their inability to integrate their personality into their greater life, modern materialist medicine is no help. Like the story of the man who dropped his keys somewhere else and was asked why he was looking under a distant streetlamp for them, and whose answer was “This is where the light is!”, doctors pass out medications because they have no skill in helping people integrate their personalities. (Well, certainly not in my case, anyway.)

The real difficulty of helping people integrate their personalities is that it’s very difficult to distinguish where mental health symptoms originate – from within or outside of the patient. Moreover, if a symptom does come from outside the patient, doctors are loath to accuse the families and other social institutions of being in the wrong, as those are very often the source of their livelihood. And sometimes the symptoms originate within the doctor himself(!), via the projection of the doctor’s own unconscious complexes.